24.07.2002
After New Labour
It seems clear that something is changing. At the provocatively named 'After New Labour' conference, hosted by the Socialist Campaign Group of Labour MPs on July 20, around 500 people packed into the main hall of the TUC's Congress House for a "discussion of policies capable of keeping Labour in power by meeting the concerns of Labour supporters" (Socialist Campaign Group News July 2002). Its mood was upbeat and a renewed air of confidence was palpable, despite the glaringly obvious fact that the meeting failed to attract fresh forces. Primarily, that confidence came from the line-up on the platform rather than those seated before them in the hall. The main speakers included Tony Benn, Bob Crow of the RMT, Dave Prentis of Unison, Billy Hayes of the CWU and - incredibly, some might say - John Edmonds of the GMB. Together these luminaries sent out a rather stark message to Blair. The big battalions of the trade union bureaucracy have been staunch supporters of the New Labour counterreformation, accepting a subordinate role for themselves in the new set-up. To now hear John Edmonds - once a loyal new realist - tell an audience of assorted Labour lefts that he comes "to bury New Labour, not to praise it", indeed that "New Labour is dead already", must be a tad disconcerting for the Millbank apparatchiks. A series of left victories in the unions has disrupted the cosy relationship between the trade union tops and Labour. Edmonds' Shakespearean flourish reflects the as yet inchoate pressures from the rank and file. As we predicted some time ago, working class discontent with New Labour clearly is being expressed not only in mass abstentions, but positively, in votes - only, to begin with, in union rather than parliamentary elections. This is hardly surprising. There is no viable electoral alternative to Blair's party at present - either of the right or the left. Despite important strikes recently, the level of industrial action in real terms remains at an all-time low. The Financial Times soberly comments that talk of a return to the halcyon days of the 1970s is "far-fetched" (July 22). Since Labour returned to power in 1997, 1.8 million days have been notched up in strike action - fewer than in any single year under Margaret Thatcher. This year's total will pick up, helped by a rash of rail strikes and more than half a million days accounted for by the council workers' action. But it will fall far short of 1979's 19.5 million or 1984's 27.1 million. The council and rail workers' strikes indicate that working class confidence is slowly returning. But our class is still not able to assert itself through industrial might after the series of crushing defeats from the mid-1980s. The discontent that undoubtedly exists below is thus finding other channels, primarily in the field of trade union elections, it now seems. Blairites have been defeated over and over again in contests at all levels of the movement and now this fissure is manifesting itself in the top reaches of the bureaucracy itself. Vladimir Derer of the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy told me that he viewed the Socialist Campaign Group conference as part of a period of "flux, not things moving in a leftwing direction". Yet this would seem to be belied by his own words in the latest issue of Socialist Campaign Group News. Reporting the results of this year's elections for the six constituency places for Labour's national executive committee in April, he noted that support for the Centre-Left Grassroots Alliance had produced "a rise in the number of votes cast and the highest share of the vote for the CLGA since [it] was formed", reflecting "growing disenchantment among the rank and file". The campaign won three out of the six places. There are other indications of revolt. While the NEC blocked Ken Livingstone's re-application to the party on July 23, the closeness of the decision - by 17 votes to 13 - is being taken as an encouraging sign in left Labour circles in the capital. It is true that this discontent from below is still characterised by extremely low expectations. This finds reflection in the cautious political pronouncements of the trade union leaders and left MPs, even as they express dissent. Despite his self-declared role as New Labour's gravedigger, John Edmonds still told Saturday's conference that "rebranding the party" had been correct in its time, as it had created a "distance from the myths about our policies" - concretely on tax and the influence of the unions. Similarly, Benn noted that the BBC now claimed that there was "no difference" between left and right. "Well, I'm not going to argue about that," he told the audience, "but there is a difference between right and wrong." He expresses this sentiment in the current issue of Socialist Campaign Group News in this way: "Put as an argument for democracy, the audience far exceeds the left or the labour movement, since everyone wants to see democracy revived." It would be the height of stupidity to make cheap polemical points about Benn's fawning ideological rapprochement with former opponents, most notably Edmonds. In order to engage with this living process in the trade union movement properly, we have to understand what exactly is going on. We are seeing the revival of a new Labour left, or at least the first signs of it. In that sense, there could be a return to 'normal' politics after a period characterised by extraordinary conditions. You would expect opposition and discontent with an incumbent government that during its five-year tenure has pushed through some extremely unpopular legislation. The Tories remain electorally marginalised and in programmatic crisis, which the sacking of David Davis as party chairman will do nothing to resolve. Discontent has started to stir down below in the trade union movement, resulting in some surprise victories for leftwingers - Mark Serwotka in the PCSU and Derek Simpson in Amicus - and in left-sounding rhetoric from sections of the bureaucracy not normally associated with challenging Blair. Inevitably, given the nature of Labour as a bourgeois workers' party with organic links to the organised workers' movement, this development in the trade unions is starting to find a reflection in the Labour Party itself as the left stirs and starts to organise again. All of which is a huge problem for the Socialist Alliance as currently constituted, of course. Under the misleadership of the Socialist Workers Party, the SA has been cynically moulded as a version of old-style left Labourism. Speaking to one of the sessions at this year's Marxism, leading SWPer Rob Hoveman explicitly told the audience that the pivotal question of "reform versus revolution" had been "avoided" in the SA in order to ensure that the alliance could become "as big as possible" (Weekly Worker July 11). Or, in other words, revolutionary politics would 'put off' the tens of thousands of photo-fit left Labourites the SWP leadership envisages flaking away from Labour and searching for a new home. But if the real Labour left reconstitutes itself, what space will the SA then occupy? Why opt for a pale imitation of the real thing? Why would union leaders such as comrades Serwotka, Simpson or Crow dally with the SA when the real action is taking place in the ranks of Blair's party? Why would left Labourites in the party of government leave it for the wilderness? Clearly, the Marxist left must relate to this process as Marxists. Every revolution is presented with key tasks that are unique to it. The strategic question of the Russian Revolution was the need for the working class to form a revolutionary alliance with the peasantry. The parallel question of the British is to overcome the hold of Labourism on our class. The dominant organisation in the SA, the SWP, has a very limited tactical armoury when it comes to engagement with the Labour Party. For decades, it deployed a form of auto-Labourism summed up in its call at elections to 'Vote Labour, but build a fighting socialist alternative'. Effectively, this left high politics to Labour while the SWP looked after the 'proper' working class concerns of wages and conditions. Like much of the rest of a left that now finds itself in the SA standing against Labour, the shift has not been genuinely theorised. Thus, the SA poses itself point blank as "the socialist alternative" to Blair's party. At the same time important sections of it - eg, the SWP - are still capable of offering unconditional support to Labour candidates in calls to "vote Labour where you must". Meanwhile, on the ground, some SWP members of the alliance have interpreted the abandonment of auto-Labourism as carte blanche to vote for any organisation purporting to be to the left of Labour - including the Green Party, a petty bourgeois formation with no pretence to be in the workers' movement. Clearly, this confusion could be the death of the alliance collectively and of important component sections of it as individual organisations. If - when, more like - the Labour left recovers its strength, how will the Socialist Alliance relate to it? As revolutionaries, or as pretend left Labourites? What about the self-serving nonsense of Peter Taaffe's Socialist Party, that Blair's Labour is now simply a straight bourgeois party? Will it simply demand that the left leave the party and join the SP? (In truth, given the SP's softness on, and similarity to, left Labourism, the traffic is likely to flow the other way.) The Alliance for Workers' Liberty claims to be outside the Labour Party because avenues for discussing and influencing policy have been "closed", as we were told at its recent Ideas for Freedom school - essentially a technical justification for where it finds itself today and deeply unconvincing, given the consistent work that others still conduct in the ranks of Blair's party. The same problem faces Workers Power and the International Socialist Group. The stirrings of a new Labour and trade union left should present revolutionaries with great opportunities. The tactical approaches we deploy have to be subtle and patient. They should include straight electoral opposition to openly Blairite candidates, critical support for rebellious sections of the party, the call for genuine united fronts with leftwing MPs and trade union leaders to defend the interests of the working class, even systematic work in the ranks of Labour as an organised revolutionary trend. Without such a genuinely Marxist approach, the revival of the left of the Labour Party presents itself as less of an opportunity, more of a threat. Mark Fischer
Worker